Trump at Justice Department Slams Opposing Lawyers as Radicals

President Donald Trump on Friday renewed his attacks on lawyers he said have wronged him, singling out Marc Elias and Mark Pomerantz as “radicals” who tried to prevent him from returning to the White House.

Trump in a speech referred to those who “prosecuted my family, staff, and supporters, raided my home at Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States, with the help of radicals like Marc Elias and Mark Pomerantz.”

Pomerantz was a leader of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into Trump’s business practices, but he quit in 2022 over Bragg’s initial decision not to seek criminal charges against the president. Elias long represented the Democratic National Committee and fought Trump’s claims of fraud following the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s speech, which he made inside the Justice Department, shows how he is making his attacks on lawyers part of his overall law enforcement agenda. Such attacks have been increasing in recent weeks, and the moves have widely been seen as an effort to chill sections of the legal community from opposing Trump or his administration.

The president in a March 6 executive order targeted Elias’ former law firm, Perkins Coie, by threatening government contracts for the firm’s clients and banning firm employees from accessing federal buildings.

Elias responded on Friday that he will not “back down” or “bow or scrape.” He wrote in a post on the social platform Bluesky that Trump “is an unhinged wanna be dictator who is angry that I beat him in court.” Elias added that Trump is now “weaponizing the federal government against his political opponents.”

Pomerantz, a former Paul Weiss partner who now co-leads a pro bono law firm focused on combatting anti-democratic policies, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s speech.

In his speech Friday, Trump also recounted how his administration revoked the security clearances for former special counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Bragg, and the “crooked law firms” who aided “political prosecutions.”

Trump has previously said he issued the March 6 order because Perkins Coie was involved in “weaponization against a political opponent’’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Perkins Coie lawyers advised Hillary Clinton and retained Washington firm Fusion GPS for research that resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, which alleged Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russian government officials.

Perkins Coie on March 11 sued the Justice Department and other federal agencies to challenge the order. The decision is the first step in ensuring the president’s “unconstitutional” executive order is never enforced, the firm said in a statement.

A federal judge on March 12 granted Perkins Coie a temporary restraining order preventing parts of the order restricting the law firm’s lawyers from federal buildings, saying Trump’s directive “sends chills down my spine.”

— With assistance from Tatyana Monnay and Meghan Tribe